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Wednesday, 20 January 2016
Glenn Frey was the Eagles' 'spark plug' – invaluable, driven, reliable
The guitarist and singer who introduced a generation to country-rock
was a determined perfectionist with a good head for business. But it was
his voice and his songwriting that made the Eagles the biggest-selling
US band of all timeMute
If the Eagles
were America’s band, Glenn Frey was the one who helped make them so.
“Glenn was the one who started it all,” the band’s co-leader Don Henley
wrote on hearing of Frey’s death on Monday 18 January. “He was the spark
plug, the man with the plan. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of
popular music and a work ethic that wouldn’t quit. He was funny,
bullheaded, mercurial, generous, deeply talented and driven.”
That drive was there from an early age, when the guitarist made his
name in the bands the Mushrooms, the Subterraneans and the Four of Us,
playing around his home town of Detroit. “He was really into this whole
role of being a teen king,” one local told the music journalist turned
film-maker Cameron Crowe when he was writing a Rolling Stone cover story
about the Eagles.
Frey moved to Los Angeles with dreams of making it big. On day one in
the city, he happened to spy David Crosby in full rock star regalia –
green leather bat cape and hat – and saw it as an omen. He formed a duo,
Longbranch Pennywhistle, with one aspiring troubadour, JD Souther,
before learning the rudiments of songcraft from another, Jackson Browne,
with whom he and Souther briefly shared an apartment. He made the right
associations with Laurel Canyon royalty: Linda Ronstadt, who invited
Frey and Henley to become her backing band, and hippie magnate David
Geffen, who signed them to his label Asylum once they had recruited
Bernie Leadon and Randy Meisner and taken flight as the Eagles.
The Eagles may have looked like mellow rockers but there was nothing
laidback about Frey’s determination to succeed where earlier
country-rockers had failed. “We had it all planned,” he declared. “We’d
watched bands like Poco and the [Flying] Burrito Brothers lose their
initial momentum. We were determined not to make the same mistakes. This
was gonna be our best shot. Everybody had to look good, sing good, play
good and write good. We wanted it all. Peer respect. AM and FM success.
No 1 singles and albums, great music and a lot of money.”
Unkind assessments of the Eagles had them pinned as a sort of
country-rock Monkees, manufactured into being, all outlaw trappings but
little substance. Gram Parsons was sniffy, regarding them as a diluted,
even bastardised, version of what he’d tried to achieve with the Byrds
and the Burritos. Neil Young afforded them begrudging respect when he
declared in 1975, “If only for perfectly capturing the feel of LA, the
Eagles are the one band that’s carried on the spirit of Buffalo
Springfield.”
A more generous view is that the Eagles were a gateway to supposedly
cooler country rock, from Gram to the Grateful Dead, and that they
created the space for Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson to become
national treasures. Just as the Rolling Stones did with the blues, the
Eagles introduced a generation to country. Still, if the counterculture
didn’t want them, the mainstream did, thanks to Frey and Henley, who
steered the Eagles towards colossal success. “Frey and Henley,” decided
Crowe in Rolling Stone, “are the band’s primary students of the music
business. They devour all the trade magazines, reading sales figures and
interview features like most businessmen read Wall Street Journal.” The
website savingcountrymusic.com
deemed Frey the Eagles’ “most polarising figure”, his “rapaciousness
for dealing with the business affairs of the band” earning him the
reputation of a “money first, then music” musician. It also pointed out
that without that hard-nosed approach, the Eagles might not have become
the biggest-selling American band of all time.
Of
course, without Frey’s perfectionist streak in the studio, his pure,
slightly melancholy tenor (that’s him singing on the Eagles hits Lyin’
Eyes, Take It Easy and Tequila Sunrise) and the songs he co-wrote with
Henley and the other members, that business acumen would have had no
valuable outlet. If Henley brought the blues, Frey – a big fan of 60s
Motown, the lush early-70s productions of Thom Bell for the Spinners and Delfonics,
and even Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall – inveigled R&B elements
into the Eagles’ music. They may have been quintessential heartland
rockers offering blue-collar country for the masses, but listen again to
One of These Nights (Frey’s own favourite Eagles track) or I Can’t Tell You Why, both suffused with soul sorrow, and you will hear a sweet sound closer to Memphis than to Nashville.
Frey was also prone to bust-ups – his seething aside to second
guitarist Don Felder, “I’m gonna kick your ass when we get off the
stage”, has entered rock lore – and he did his fair share of partying:
there was nothing ersatz about his embrace of 70s rock star excess. But
if the Eagles were corporate, he was the CEO, always putting work first.
“Here’s my theory: I loved music more than anything else. More than I
loved partying,” he told US radio host Dan Patrick in April 2015. “We were functioning party animals. We never missed work. We always showed up in relatively good shape.”
Like Henley, he found success outside of the band in the 80s, after
they split in acrimonious circumstances, reaching No 2 with the The Heat Is On,
and even acting on TV and in movies such as Jerry Maguire. But the
Eagles remained his first love. Or rather, love-hate: their 1994
comeback tour was wryly named Hell Freezes Over. Frey was still touring
with them up to last year, even if life on the road wasn’t quite as
crazed as at the band’s hedonistic zenith. Asked by Patrick what the
band did these days on the road, Frey quipped: “We sleep.”
If the Eagles’ commercial standing in the 70s was matched by critical
loathing, more recently their music – and the same can be said of
Fleetwood Mac, who were equally reviled as purveyors of mellow pabulum –
has gained acceptance and appreciation. Since Frey’s death, artists as
varied as Ryan Adams and Justin Timberlake have praised him on Twitter.
The US rocker Bob Seger, who also came through the 60s Detroit rock
scene, summed up Frey and the Eagles’ status best when he heard of his
old friend’s death: “The Eagles weren’t very well liked by critics, but
that doesn’t mean they weren’t important,” he told the Detroit News.
“The reason they were important … was Glenn Frey.” • This article was amended on 19 January 2016 to attribute the quote from Bob Seger to the Detroit News.
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